102-12. Precious and Pecola

As you know, because of the Bayram this week I showed the film Precious by Lee Daniels to Sections A2 and D2.

I chose this film because it dramatises many of the same themes we saw in The bluest eye. It's set in Harlem in 1987. Precious (Claireece Precious Jones), the African-American protagonist, is 16 years old, semi-literate, overweight and unattractive. Physically abused by her mother, sexually abused by her father since the age of 3, Precious is pregnant with her father's second child; the first child, nicknamed 'Mongo', has Down's Syndrome and is being cared for by her grandmother. Precious is suspended from school for being pregnant (I don't know how this is legal, actually), but her principal recommends an alternative school, and it is here that she meets dedicated teacher Miss Rain and a small group of female classmates ranging from former drug addicts to gang members, all of whom are struggling to improve their reading skills in order to get their GEDs (a qualification equivalent to a high school diploma). After giving birth to her second child, Abdul Jamal, Precious learns that her rapist father has died - and that he has given her the HIV virus.

Here are some of the heartbreaking parallels between the lives of Precious and Pecola:

• Both are unwanted by their mothers and raped by their fathers.
  
• Both are very black and 'ugly' and suffer from an extreme lack of self-worth: "We're just ugly black grease to be wiped away" - this line really affected me.
  
• Neither girl opens her mouth at school, and both are teased and bullied.
  
• To escape her abuse and her torment, Precious envisions herself as a diva on a floodlit stage wearing beautiful costumes and watched by an adoring young man; Pecola tells Frieda and Claudia of the pretty dresses and jewellery given to her by the three whores and eventually goes mad, believing herself to be a bird that can fly away from the pain.
  
• Precious slowly does her hair in front of the mirror as a slim blonde white woman gazes serenely back at her; Pecola loves little white girls like Shirley Temple and ends up believing she has blue eyes, the bluest eyes.
  
• Precious writes in her journal that she wants to be "skinny, light-skinned and have long wavy hair"; Pecola is jealous of Maureen Peal's light skin, green eyes and soft hair.

I watched this film with an enormous sense of shame. I know I am not personally responsible, but I feel a collective sense of guilt that African-Americans are still living in such appalling conditions in our country. Maybe you know the old saying, 'The more things change, the more they stay the same'.

However, unlike Pecola, Precious gets a chance at redemption. She develops friendships with her teacher, classmates and the male nurse who helped deliver her baby; she wins a mayor's award for literacy; she greatly improves her score on the literacy test; she rejects her mother once and for all after her mother confesses to having allowed her husband to repeatedly touch and rape her daughter; she starts attending therapy groups for survivors of sexual abuse; she gets her firstborn child back and vows to teach her children, to meet their needs. She is a tower of strength, and Daniels shows us her humanity, as Morrison showed us Pecola's humanity. By the end of the film we no longer see an obese black girl, we see a person.

Please read more good posts about this film:

• Tümay
• Simge
• Ezgi O.
• Cemre Naz
• Ezgi Y.
  

'Peacock feather' by Panache, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 2.0 Generic

102-11. The bluest sky

I am haunted by one passage in particular from The bluest eye:

"The orange-patched sky of the steel-mill section never reached this part of town. This sky was always blue" (p. 105).

In many ways, this one sentence exemplifies not only the racist and classist segregation of Lorain, Ohio, but everything that is wrong with our world. We gluttonously consume without thinking of the consequences, the human cost, the ecological cost. As long as the skies of our lives are blue, we give little thought to the suffering of others, and we are determined to maintain that blueness even if we have to paint it on, thereby creating an artifice and ignoring the encroaching orange patches all around us. I believe humans should strive for happiness, but we have an enormous blind spot, and our capacity for happiness will, in a most profound irony, cause our ultimate destruction - unless we can find happiness in alleviating the misery of others and working to solve the enormous problems we are faced with. We need to derive our contentment from an understanding of the whole, not lie under our blue sky oblivious to the choking pollution just over the way.

'Untitled' by Guilherme Cecílio, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.0

102-10. False loyalties: Pauline and the white woman

For my first post on our novel The bluest eye, I'd like to write about false loyalties. Recall that before she joined the Fisher family as a maid, Pauline Breedlove worked for another white woman (pp. 118-121). Although the family is quite dirty, in a literal sense, and she doesn't especially like the white woman, she is at least getting by - until Cholly turns up drunk demanding money. This precipitates a confrontation between Pauline and the white woman:

"She said she would let me stay if I left him. I thought about that. But later on it didn't seem none too bright for a black woman to leave a black man for a white woman" (p. 120).

Here we see Pauline's unwillingness to betray her own race - not because she loves Cholly or being black, but because she senses that black people have to stick together, and that white people cannot be trusted to help them out of their predicament. Although uneducated, Pauline has wise instincts. And unfortunately, she is right to be mistrustful; because she cannot bring herself to leave Cholly, the white woman withholds the $11 she owes her, money that will put food in the mouths of her children. This cruel conditionality serves to highlight the power inequalities between this middle-class white woman and the hapless Pauline, ones which the white woman seems entirely oblivious to:

"...she told me I shouldn't let a man take advantage over me. That I should have more respect, and it was my husband's duty to pay the bills, and if he couldn't, I should leave and get alimony" (p. 120).

This encounter predicts some of the difficulties of the third wave of feminism, which was once again largely led by white middle-class women. However, what differentiated this period of feminism was the growing chorus of voices from women of colour, oppressed by both race and gender, who argued that the mainstream women's movement at best failed to address and at worst marginalised their specific concerns. The white woman here naively assumes that all women are on equal footing - which is ironic since she employs the black woman - and sees Pauline's abusive marriage as something that can be ended with a simple personal choice. The gulf between the two women is endless.

And notice that the white woman never pays the money that is very nearly a matter of life and death for Pauline. For all her 'concern' about Pauline's self-respect, she ends up consigning her to a further round of suffering and misery. I was reminded of the land owner in "The man who was almost a man", which we read last semester. Many students were convinced that he 'loved' the black boy Dave; here we see the fickleness of such love. Black servants are 'loved' as long as they toe the line, do not talk back. The Fisher family 'loves' Pauline - but how long do you think their loyalty would last if it were in any way tested?

'N' by Cedric Favaro, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic